(MIT News: Cambridge, MA) -- The roadway network is an important part of the nation’s transportation system, but it also contributes heavily to greenhouse gas emissions. A paper published this month in the Journal of Cleaner Production by researchers with the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub (CSHub) introduces a way to reduce emissions across a roadway network by using big data to identify specific pavement sections where improvements will have the greatest impact.

For the recent paper, CSHub researchers Arghavan Louhghalam and Mehdi Akbarian, and Professor Franz-Josef Ulm, the CSHub faculty director, studied more than 5,000 lane-miles of Virginia’s interstate highway system.

“We found that the maintenance of just a few lane miles allows for significant performance improvement, along with lowered environmental impact, across the entire network,” explains Louhghalam, the paper’s lead author. “Maintaining just 1.5 percent of the roadway network would lead to a reduction of 10 percent in greenhouse gas emissions statewide.”

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